LONDON — Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died Sunday, having been the last survivor of 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic.
She was 97 years old, and she died where she had lived — in Southampton, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.
She died in her sleep early Sunday, her friend Gunter Babler told The Associated Press.
Babler said Dean's longtime companion, Bruno Nordmanis, called him in Switzerland to say staff members at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton discovered Dean in her room Sunday morning. He said she had been hospitalized with pneumonia last week, but she had recovered and returned to the home.
A staff nurse at the nursing home said late Sunday that no one would comment until administrators came on duty this morning.
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Dean was just over 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.
Dean was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.
Babler, who is head of the Switzerland Titanic Society, said Dean was a "very good friend of very many years."
"I met her through the Titanic society, but she became a friend and I went to see very every month or so," Babler added.
The Titanic was a luxury vessel, but it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.
Dean's family members were steerage passengers setting out from England for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconist shop in Kansas City, Mo., where his wife had relatives.
Dean said her father's quick actions saved her, his 2-year-old son and his wife. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety.
"That's partly what saved us — because he was so quick," Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998.
Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean never married. She worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm.
She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago..
